Capitol Ideas/Worst Book of the Year

...The same pattern is also observable with a number of other journalists, perhaps most strikingly Talbott's own boss, Henry A. Grunwald...

...What did Burt say, then...

...if this were true the British and the French would surely be negotiating about their nuclear weapons...

...I recently mentioned to Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defense who is the villain in Talbott's account, that perhaps no more than a hundred people really read cover to cover all the voluminous U.S...

...That's one name that doesn't show up in Talbott's index...

...I know that...

...outpourings about arms control in books, newspapers, and magazines...

...The first unwritten rule is that negotiation is a good, in and of itself...

...The far more serious problem is that, even if all the conversations are reported accurately by Talbott, the book remains highly misleading and tendentious...

...Breaching etiquette and calling attention to the Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...Perle denies that he said it...

...to deny it if he is so inclined...

...Perle's position derives from an appreciation of that asymmetry: "It is extremely difficult to achieve militarily significant results through arms control...

...Rowny ended up being almost as much of an obstacle to the achievement of a new agreement as he had been to the ratification of the old one," he mendaciously asserts at one point...

...Draper, a historian, complained at length about Talbott's "novelistic" journalism, and ' his refusal to supply the sources of his information...

...CAPITOL IDEAS TAS's Annual J. Gordon Coogler Award: WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR Like the use of the word "protocol" in connection with arms control negotiations...

...At one point Talbott describes with great excitement "a meeting shrouded in secrecy" held at the Wye Plantation in Maryland...

...No thanks, Strobe...

...It was promptly hailed by the arms control community, both in news columns and on op-ed pages, but it has not been widely read...

...There are more than that in Moscow alone...

...If he had a source inside the room, why didn't Talbott tell us about Burt's position on arms control...

...modified its position at least eight times in the START talks, each time coming closer to the Soviet position...

...Since talks are merely procedural and defense is substantive, there is quite a disparity between these two responsibilities...

...It is a matter of record that policy positions advocated by lalbott in Time are in most instances congruent with Soviet positions, although I stress that it is un-necessary to speculate on the psychological origins of this ideological congruence...

...Thus Perle's position on arms control is far more straightforward than Burt's, but you wouldn't know it from Talbott's book...

...Most recently, I notice, Talbott has become greatly exercised over the Strategic Defense Initiative...

...And from this it follows that the U.S...

...No thanks, Andrei...

...Talbott continues: "The State Department representatives, Burt and Howe, were willing to talk philosophy too, but with a very different thrust from Perle's...

...Europe wants it and Congress wants it...

...A good book might one day be written about arms control but Strobe Talbott is not the man for the job...

...He was the first Western journalist admitted to Kabul after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example...

...agreement not to deploy intermediate-range weapons in Europe...

...First Perle is quoted as saying of arms control: "This stuff is a soporific...

...Set in the wider context of the unremitting war that the Soviet Union is and for many years has been waging on the West, the bureaucratic struggle among such figures as Burt, Perle, Nitze, and Rowny could indeed be of absorbing interest...

...Since the book has been hailed as an account of the struggle between "the two Richards," Burt and Perle, the former "devoted to achieving progress in arms control," the latter "the Prince of Darkness" to his "many enemies," this is quite a problem...

...It attributes the "failure of the talks" to U.S...

...It was sheer dishonesty not to...

...One of the most serious errors in the book, almost comic in its magnitude, is that Talbott misrepresents the position of one of his main characters, Richard Burt of the State Department...

...But then again, Talbott says nothing about, and in fact continually obscures in all his writing, the political asymmetry between the U.S...

...and the USSR...

...Therefore we have to reeducate the public, lower their expectations, so we are not under pressure to present them with an arms control 'achievement' that is no such thing...

...In writing about arms control, I have found, one is expected to abide by protocol...

...The deal is like this: A mugger says that if you take off your bulletproof vest, he will throw away one or two of the extra guns back in his apartment...

...The Defense Department's role is the purely defensive one of insisting that the resulting concessions do not undermine the nation's security...

...But you would hardly know it from Talbott's account...

...Perhaps the best known such advocate/journalist today is Strobe Talbott, the 38-year-old Washington bureau chief of Time magazine...

...Yermishkin, assigned to the press section of the Soviet Embassy in Washington in the mid 1970s, was denied admission to the United States in March 1974, when he applied for a visa to be the Soviet "Olympic attache" in Los Angeles...

...There is (as the liberals say) a clear "pattern of discrimination" in favor of the Soviet point of view...

...It will inevitably and irrevocably expose the political asymmetry between the two sides...

...It puts our society to sleep...

...Nevertheless, that is their objective...

...It gives us an inaccurate picture of the negotiations...

...It is known, for exam-, ple, that he met while in Geneva with the Soviet START team member who was identified as an agent of the KGB, Oleg Yermishkin...

...Neither does Talbott tell us what Perle's position is on arms control...

...But there I go violating arms control protocol...

...What does seem certain is that Talbott enjoys the confidence of Soviet officials, and with good reason...

...It refers both to the forms of etiquette observed by diplomats, and to the text of an unratified treaty...

...and about the broader context of U.S.-Soviet relations, without which no understanding of arms control is possible, it is entirely silent...

...Why doesn't Talbott ever tell us anything about the discussions and arguments that went on between the Soviet officials...

...His visa was denied, John Hughes of the State Department said, because "host governments reserve the right to protect their own security and other interests...

...The book is strongly biased and cites no authorities, Draper pointed out...

...One is reminded of the mice who told the farmer that if he didn't get a cat, neither would they...

...According to publishing sources, the book has sold poorly, considering its favorable reception...

...The Soviets had not the slightest intention of arriving at a strategic arms agreement in Geneva, because their whole purpose was to hold START hostage to a U.S...

...Draper made some good points but his critique was methodological, not substantive...

...should adopt "negotiable" positions-that is, positions that the Soviet Union is likely to approve of...

...It is not the weapons themselves that give rise to the negotiations, as the arms control lobbyists are forever insinuating...

...After the mechanical praise from the arms control lobby, Theodore Draper published an unexpected attack on the book in the New York Times Book Review in December...

...The illusion of symmetry is in fact maintained by talking about "the two superpowers," "two scorpions in a bottle," "two apes on a treadmill"-all American formulations...

...Perle is simply represented as an obstructionist with motives that remain obscure...

...and the Soviet Union doesn't really exist...

...Draper took Flora Lewis and Tom Wicker to task for calling the book "rigorous," "objective," and "authoritative...

...Talbott's reporting of the meeting conveniently fades out at that point...

...it is the Soviet threat, not the "nuclear threat," that is the crucial ingredient...

...But we have to engage in it for political reasons...

...U.S...

...It in effect left open the possibility that the book could be restored to academic respectability by the addition of footnotes...

...SDI has put arms control in a state of "crisis," Talbott worries...

...Perle told me he felt that Talbott's misrepresentation of Burt's position undermines the whole thesis of the book...

...inflexibility rather than Soviet intransigence In fact, the U.S...

...The trouble with Talbott is that he is not at all objective...

...In fact, it is not an effective rebuttal of a reported conversation to say that we don't know how the author overheard it...

...This is a rather small collection of people, most of them living in Washington, some of them employed by American newspapers and magazines...

...One can observe and describe this pattern without reference to the process that produced it...

...And for reasons that are best known to himself, he continually comes down on what is effectively the Soviet side...

...It gives one no pleasure to admit that the chief START negotiator, General Edward Rowny, was in fact so "flexible," but the truth is he was...

...Let them have it...

...In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Grunwald made a number of foreign policy suggestions that seemed at first sight evenhanded but on closer inspection would have the practical effect of assisting the Soviet Union...

...Here they present their views, the views of the State Department, and the congruent views of the Soviet Union to a much larger audience...

...Meanwhile his six-shooter is still trained on you...

...Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control, Knopf...

...Surely he had something to say...

...This, then, is the State Department's role in arms control negotiations: to insist upon "negotiability...

...Think about that...

...According to an article by Roger Jellinek in the New York Times Book Review (May 16,1971), the prologue to that book, "smoothly written in the first person and more firmly argued than anything else in the book, was almost certainly the creation of the 23-year-old collator and translator, Strobe Talbott, a student of Russian literature and member of Time's Moscow bureau for the summer of 1969...

...It does violence to our ability to maintain adequate defenses...

...What if they too get "Star Wars...

...Talbott, of course, was the translator and editor of Khrushchev's memoirs, published in 1970...

...Two weeks later there was a follow-up in the Book Review, with a letter from the Secretary of Defense calling some comments attributed to him by Talbott "complete lies," while Paul Nitze, the chief INF negotiator, explained that he had been the source of some of the reported conversations...

...Like Talbott I offer no source: "Arms control is most unlikely to produce results that have any military significance...

...According to a Time source, Talbott later requested that this information about the source of the Khrushchev material be excluded from Time's official history...

...official involved in the talks told me...

...Using Talbott's technique I will supply Burt's arms control philosophy in direct quotations, leaving it up to Burt...

...arguments and concerns get minimal or no attention...

...Rebuttal depends on the participants' denial, which (with the exception of Weinberger) Draper did not adduce...

...In effect, Draper asked, how can we know that these reported conversations (often in direct quotations) really took place as described, by Tom Bethell when we don't know who told Talbott what...

...Talbott has good Soviet sources...

...I therefore did my best to help him get the sections dealing directly with me right...

...he is in fact very much a participant in this struggle...

...He editorializes on behalf of "an agreement of indefinite duration that could, if necessary, involve tradeoffs between offense and defense...

...A similar attack was mounted some years ago against Bob Woodward's book on the Supreme Court, and against the second Woodward and Bernstein book on Watergate...

...For the Pentagon it is not "talks" that must succeed, but the defense of the nation...

...The Khrushchev material is believed to have been brought to the West by Victor Louis, an agent of the KGB...

...Soviet arguments and concerns are emphasized throughout the book," a U.S...

...A week later, Yer-mishkin's visa denial was described, in an anonymous piece in Time, as "a somewhat ungraceful feint that left all involved feigning outrage...

...Talbott must know this perfectly well, but it does not suit his ideological purpose to say so...

...17.95...

...tremendous asymmetries between the two countries-the one surrounded by walls and guards to stop people from running away, the other flooded by immigrants-is regarded as bad manners by the arms control "community...

...No," he said...

...And that, too, is the Soviet position...

...A second and most important rule of arms control etiquette is that the writer is expected to pretend the gross political asymmetry between the U.S...

...Formerly the magazine's diplomatic correspondent, Talbott has written a book, Deadly Gambits,1 about the recent (1981-83) arms control negotiations in Geneva...

...No CAT-scan is needed...

...For example, he wrote, "the Soviets might be willing to curb certain actions elsewhere in the world in exchange for Western accommodation over Afghanistan...

...So have the Soviets...

...Talbott's book has been praised for its adherence to arms control etiquette and its consequent disparagement of the United States...

...But it is easy to see why they dislike Strategic Defense...

...Its corollary is that "talks" should meet with "success...